Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.

What I Learned About Modern Hotels from 1960s Hawaiian Resorts

I recently took a trip to the Filoli house, a 654-acre historic country estate located 30 miles south of San Francisco in Woodside, California. This fantastic property–noted for its 16-acre formal garden–appears on the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and is open to the public. The home itself, built in 1917, features exquisite architecture and details right out of fairytales.

While I had a great time touring the estate, I ended up walking away with–of all things–insights into the hospitality industry. In 1937, Filoli was purchased by the Roth family, which famously created the Royal Hawaiian Hotel (the first resort in Waikiki) and the Matson luxury cruise line to transport guests to the resort. The hospitality industry was integral to the success of the family and was instrumental in the creation of the Filoli house you see today.

While touring the house, I noticed many artifacts from the cruise lines and hotels. I also noticed that the kitchen and staff quarters operated on modern hotel principles, while using 1930s- to 1960s-era technology.

I had an interesting conversation with the tour guide about how the Filoli estate and the cruise ships/hotels operated in the 1960s. While certain challenges hoteliers face today are new, many guest services issues haven’t changed much at all.

There were servant quarters at Filoli, and it took 16 household staff–chefs, butlers, groundskeepers and maids–to serve the Roth family. That’s not very different than operating a modern lodging business, in terms of the employee-to-guest staff management ratio.

Guests at Filoli could push a ‘room service’ button by their beds, which would light up an indicator board in the butler’s room. Today, room service is ordered through multiple means–through the phone, in-room tablets and even smartphone apps.

The Matson cruise line was the first to hire artists such as Frank McIntosh, Eugene Savage, John Kelly and Louis Macouillard to create commercial art for resort advertisements (I included an example above). Hotels today also use commercial artwork to build their brand image.

Guests got newspapers in the morning as part of breakfast service. Today, hotels offer Wi-Fi, so guests can read the news on their mobile devices.

To generate demand for the resort, Matson built a cruise line from the West Coast of the U.S. to Hawaii. Today, hotels invest in their own infrastructure to attract guests, notably contact centers that leverage email, Web and social media to market their properties to customers.

It was refreshing to look at how the hospitality industry operated in the past, and the ways technology changed the guest experience.

One last note. I took a photo of Filoli’s kitchen stove because it stuck out as unique to the era. Turns out, it was an industrial stove from one of the Matson cruise ships. It’s electric (which was rare back then), and is mildly magnetized while powered, so that the pots and pans wouldn’t spill while the cruise ship was in motion. I thought that was an ingenious way of addressing cooking on a cruise ship before modern stabilization measures.

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How Do You Create a Tech-Driven Guest Experience?

Hospitality, one of the world’s most prevalent and influential industries, is using tech-driven guest experiences to boost success. In addition to the usual business trips and family vacations, hotels are a staple for everything from weddings to global conferences to concerts and shows. At resorts, hotels, casinos and cruises, billions of people worldwide book reservations every year, each expecting a guest experience that goes above and beyond the norm.

Guests are focusing less on room service and bell boys and more on 24×7 virtual concierges and personalized mobile travel guides, which proves that the tech-driven guest experience has arrived. In a recent Information Age article, Avaya UK Managing Director Steve Rafferty explores the transformative power of a mobile app for delivering a truly custom—even predictive—guest experience. In Rafferty’s much-needed discussion about the ever-evolving hospitality industry, he concludes that “technology, customized for the hospitality industry and backed by solid in-person service, can help hoteliers today to deliver the superior and personalized experiences their guests expect.”

This leaves just one question: how can hospitality leaders go about creating this tech-driven guest experience, specifically through infrastructure investments and/or upgrades?

Many organizations have proven that a next-gen guest experience is very possible to achieve. To better ensure guest safety, the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas boasts video surveillance speeds that are up to 11 times faster than its competitors. The Rotana Group, an international hotel and entertainment chain, uses advanced contact center and IP solutions to enable secure and seamless communications across its properties worldwide, supporting a more 360-degree guest experience.

Three Ways to Create a Tech-Driven Guest Experience

So, as a leader or IT decision maker within the hospitality industry, how can you proactively address your guest’s needs with the right technology? Here are three significant ways a customer engagement platform can help drive the desired guest experience:

Innovate at the first point of contact.

There’s no denying that for most guests, the first point of contact is a hotel’s web site. A 2015 study conducted by Expedia found that consumers visit an average of 38 websites before booking a reservation. Overall, travelers tend to double the time they spend surfing the web the week before booking. Needless to say, there’s plenty of opportunity for hoteliers to elevate guests’ web experiences with the right technology.

How? As opposed to offering guests a web form (or worse, a dreaded 800 number), you can offer guests live chat support via WebRTC. Of course, guests should also be able to easily escalate their live chat session to voice if needed—and from there to video chat or screen sharing for particularly complex reservations or issues. A customer engagement platform created on an open, extensible architecture lets you support this dynamic environment with the ability to create apps that customize and extend your call center. This can help you to create new points of differentiation, or change them as you see fit. So you can ensure a stellar guest experience from the first point of contact onward.

Improve resource matching.

Front desk workers must skillfully handle calls from families, school groups, business travelers, wedding planners, convention planners, language specialists, and more. With hotels becoming more dynamic by the minute, the need for improved resource matching is vital. This means ensuring callers can be quickly and intelligently routed to the right subject matter experts—regardless of where they reside within the organization—based on rich context, KPIs and organizational goals across all channels.

An advanced customer engagement platform tracks guest conversations and consolidates customer data across all of these channels (i.e., web, mobile, contact center), creating a real-time data repository for hotel workers to track, collect and share relevant information across teams, processes and customer touch points. This ensures callers will always be paired with the best subject matter experts available. Additionally, this allows agents to focus on callers’ needs without having to ask for the same information multiple times (which, as we all know, is a huge customer frustration). Above all, the technology helps to deliver more consistent and meaningful experiences at the individual guest level.

Perhaps most importantly, hoteliers must offer guests asophisticated and integrated mobile app experience. This experience should include such things as seamlessly integrated self service and callback options, something that a customer engagement platform easily supports.
Mobility is not only advantageous for usage with guests’ mobile phones—it also addresses a need for staff to be mobile. For example, as mentioned in the point above, callers must be routed to the right subject matter experts regardless of where they reside within the organization. Mobility helps ensure subject matter experts are accessible, wherever they happen to be located on the property, for handling both guest inquires as well as internal operations.

Technology is changing the hotel guest experience. There’s ample room for innovation within the industry, and there’s a way to efficiently, securely and flexibly enable guest experiences that continually exceed expectations. How does Avaya know for sure? Avaya supplied the technology that transformed the Wynn Hotel, the Rotana Group, and many other world-renowned hospitality organizations. A customer engagement platform built on open, extensible architecture gives you an open scope, meaning anything is possible in terms of the guest experiences you want to deliver.

Positive guest experiences are the top criteria travelers use to select hotels, far outweighing price and location. Improving the guest experience is profitable, too: Customers who report having positive guest experiences spend 140 percent more than those who had poor experiences.

Hoteliers are increasingly embracing technology to differentiate the guest experience, and Avaya is at the forefront of developing the technology (and the network) to power positive guest experiences.

Next week, Avaya will showcase its hotel solutions at HITEC 2015, the largest hospitality technology tradeshow in the world. Join us at booth #752.

Let’s take a look at two ways Avaya can help improve the guest experience.

Communication-Enabling Apps and Websites

Nearly every hotel in the world today has a website. Most major hotel chains have either launched an official mobile app, or are actively developing one. These self-service websites and apps are designed to help guests book a room, and connect with the hotel before arriving.

Forward-thinking hoteliers are building interactive tools to help enhance their guests’ experience during their stay: indoor maps, spa and restaurant reservations, room service and suggested day trips through partners.

At HITEC 2015, we’re exhibiting the Avaya Engagement Development Platform, a software development kit that makes it easy to communication-enable websites and mobile apps. With just a few steps, developers can add “click to call” buttons inside any app, instantly connecting the guest with the front desk, concierge, onsite restaurant, and more.

Flexible engagement modules, called Snap-ins, are capable of enabling a range of communication-enabled experiences. For example, a hotel might use Snap-ins to build location-aware beacons that identify VIP guests and notify hotel staff to greet them personally.

Hotel app developers are exploring time- and location-aware notifications to, for example, encourage people to book restaurant reservations during slow times, or push relevant information about the property as the guest walks past.

Avaya built EDP to be platform-agnostic—it’s designed to communication-enable any app, working with disparate content management systems, programming languages and competing silos of information.

Flexible, Virtual Networking

A flexible, virtual network is critical to a successful hotel experience. Avaya SDN Fx is an IEEE standard Ethernet architecture based on Shortest-Path Bridging that makes it simpler for hotels to provision new services and reconfigure networks on the fly.

Consider the Dubai World Trade Center, one of the world’s largest convention centers. It would sometimes take days to reconfigure the network between major tradeshows. As exhibitors showed up, technicians would invariably spend the day manually provisioning services, making changes to the network and troubleshooting errors.

Avaya SDN Fx allows hotels to run all of their applications on one network, securely, with built-in resiliency. There’s no need to have separate networks for all hotel services. If a networking switch goes down, Avaya SDN Fx automatically routes traffic to the remaining switches.

That means guests enjoy uninterrupted WiFi. Hotels lower their IT costs by managing a single network virtually. Hotels control the applications on their networks—for example, limiting video streaming on the lobby WiFi, so that it doesn’t affect network performance for other guests.

Avaya guest engagement and simplified networks solutions help hotels deliver differentiated guest experiences. Join us as we showcase both at HITEC 2015, booth #752, from June 16-18 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. Listen to our latest healthcare solutions podcast: Innovating the Hospitality Marketplace.

5 Ways Las Vegas Delivers the Ultimate Guest Experience

Las Vegas is arguably the entertainment capital of the world, and is constantly adapting to industry trends and the demographics of its visitors to remain successful.

Over the years, I have seen a lot of interesting innovations in the hospitality industry on display in Las Vegas. After a recent trip, the city continues to surprise me.

Here are five ways that Las Vegas manages to deliver the ultimate guest experience for its 39 million+ visitors each year:

#1: Appealing to Shifting Demographics

Las Vegas continues to reposition itself to adjust to a changing environment. Originally created as a gambling destination in the desert, its expanded into drawing business travelers for conventions, entertainment with big-name celebrities and musicians, fine dining and shopping. The city also offers different experiences for different price points–from the ultra-luxurious Wynn to affordable properties off the strip.

#2: Communicating Across All Channels

My Las Vegas hotel emailed me before my arrival with weather alerts and transportation options. All of the city’s major properties currently engage with guests across social media, email, Web, phone and text message. Promotional text message alerts are particularly popular in Vegas; the proactive nature of the interactions spur instant action, without the need to download standalone mobile apps.

#3: Proving a Rich Experience Wherever Your Guests Are

Las Vegas is definitely a city where “thinking outside the box” is encouraged, in terms of providing services and selling opportunities. At the day club at the Cosmopolitan Hotel, there are temporary gaming tables across from the entrance, just during opening hours. At the airport, Johnny Walker offered free (small) product samples in front of the duty free shop.

Las Vegas’ McCarran International Airport was one of the few duty free shops I have been to that allow non-international travelers to shop there; they just have a different price.

#4: Leverage History and Traditions While Delivering the Future

Many of the hotels in Las Vegas have a long history that they maintain, even as they renew their image. The use of the Elvis statue at the Westgate (previously LVH and Las Vegas Hilton, where Elvis performed) ties the property to the past.

The recently reopened SLS (previously Sahara Hotel) also featured pieces of the old hotel, such as the jeweled S door handles, now part of the lighting fixtures. Bits of history and tradition help give the properties character and provide fodder for conversation and differentiation.

#5: Leveraging Technology for Productivity (and Customer Service)

Las Vegas is all about service, and technology is used everywhere to help improve the standard of service.

It seems like technology is being baked into every aspect of the customer experience–from automated checkout via in-room technology, sending the folio to the guest through email, video surveillance to protect guests on the property, and self-service kiosks for various services–ranging from redemption of gaming winning to ordering a cake.

Las Vegas also excels at the non-technical aspects of hospitality. Every staff member at every property I visited–from the janitors to the hotel executives–can give clear directions to every aspect of the property without hestitation. That’s the best definition of hospitality: a great experience for the guest before, during and after their visit.

Avaya is a leading provider of solutions that enable customer and team engagement across multiple channels and devices for better customer experience, increased productivity and enhanced financial performance. Its world-class contact center and unified communications technologies and services are available in a wide variety of flexible on-premise and cloud deployment options that seamlessly integrate with non-Avaya applications. The Avaya Engagement Environment enables third parties to create and customize business applications for competitive advantage. Avaya’s fabric-based networking solutions help simplify and accelerate the deployment of business critical applications and services. For more information, please visit www.avaya.com.